Make Money Online Through Affiliate Marketing

Online affiliate marketing is a very simple concept to understand and, if done properly, is a great way to make money online without incurring a lot of expense.

As an affiliate, your goal is to find people who will buy products or services from the vendor that you represent.

Once you find these people, or they find you, your objective is to “pre-sell” them on the product and then send them to the vendor web site so that they will make a purchase and you will get a commission.

Either the vendor, or the company that manages the affiliate program for the vendor, issues the affiliate a unique affiliate identification code so that they can track the customers sent to the vendor by the affiliate.

This identification code is referred to as the affiliate link. It is a very simple piece of software code that you copy and paste to your web site, email correspondence, or any other digital medium that you use. When the customer clicks on that link they are sent to the vendor’s site.

The vendor is the one who makes the sale. The vendor will pay you a commission on the sales of the people you sent. It really is that simple.

There are countless vendors and merchants looking for affiliates. Many of the largest Fortune 500 brands have online affiliate programs. And as more people become more comfortable making online purchases, and more merchants move to the web for sales – affiliate marketing is growing fast.

If you want to leverage your time and effort, as an affiliate, it’s best to find vendors who are selling products or services that will pay you a recurring income. Plenty of businesses run membership websites that will pay you a hefty monthly commission – a great way to make money and grow your income.

Many of the biggest dating sites, exercise clubs, weight loss sites, make money clubs, and vitamin and health food supplement sites offer hefty recurring income commissions to their affiliates.

Most vendors pay a significant percentage of the monthly subscription to the affiliate, as a commission, due to the fact that they do not incur the selling expense of finding that customer.

Imagine getting a $44.00 commission, every month in recurring income, for each customer that joins a membership club through your affiliate link. Get just 100 customers and you will be making $4,400.00 per month recurring income!

Then again, you may be more comfortable marketing a physcial product rather than a subscription service. This may be because you have found affiliate programs that are very unique and the demand for the product or products you have chosen is quite high. In that case, you’ve hit quite the opportunity.

Some vendors run their own affiliate program where you sign up directly with them – but most use a third party company to manage their affiliate programs.

When becoming involved with affiliate programs, you will find that they may have a process before you start selling their products or services. Some affiliate programs may wish to do things such as:

Manually review your website before completing your sign up as an affiliate. However, it does not normally take very long.

Some go through a third party that you have to register with first before you can become an affiliate.

These companies want to make sure their products will be displayed on tasteful websites and that the website’s content matches their product. It is always better when affiliate products match the niche of the website that is selling them. The site visitors are more likely to purchase products that relate to the site content.

You can probably now see that affiliate programs can be a quite effective way to make money online.

Much of your success in making money online through affiliate marketing will depend on how much traffic you can generate. There are hundreds of ways to get traffic to your affiliate link but it is always best to plan how you will market the links – and try just a couple of ways at first. If you have success then you can do more of the same or try new ways to generate traffic to your links.

You can do such things as pay per click advertising, which has become one of the hottest ways to advertise. You can also look into blogging as a way to bring attention to your affiliate links. Posting to forums can work. E-mail marketing, classified ads, directories, and article marketing are also effective ways to market your affiliate links. And there are many more ways to market your links.

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money online fast with little risk and great upside potential.